• Night of the Ringtail

    Deadlier Than It Looks

    Know what a ringtail is?  I didn’t either, until New Year’s Eve, 1998.  That’s when one checked in to my pitch black hotel room on the floor of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park.  A ringtail is a southwestern relative of the raccoon, though the only resemblance in my book […]

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  • Light Catcher

    I’d just finished a day hike down Thunder River Trail and was looking for a place to park my truck and camp. Drift smoke from a few fires farther east along the rim swaddled the lower reaches below Steamboat Mountain. I decided to camp randomly. Whatever the next road was, I’d take it. The next […]

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  • Water Falls Yet Does Not Die

    Water falls over the cliffs, bashing itself against the granite again and again, dropping down into plunge pools dozens of feet below.  It does not die.

    Water drops from the highest sky, yet doesn’t shatter.

    Not imprisoned in a skeletal shape, water sculpts the bones.

    Water assumes no form, and so it’s every form.  Unborn, it dies not.

    Ice […]

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  • 96

    It was so hot…

    ‘96’ upside down is  . . . 96.  Put down that dirty mind!  96 is also the designation of a BLM road a few miles east of Hall’s Crossing at Lake Powell.  You access 96 off of Utah Highway 276.

    You’ll drive down to Hall’s Crossing on July 4th, and find […]

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  • I’m Sorry, There’s No Record of Your Birth or Death

    North Rim, near Crazy Jug Point

    NORTH TIMP POINT, NORTH RIM, GRAND CANYON

    That’s my byline.  Sitting under a juniper, my back suffering death by a thousand cuts from cheatgrass.  Swallows, ravens cut darting arcs overhead.  Ants lay trail up and down my arm, scurrying across this very ink as I jot this down.  Horseflies strafe.  Swifts […]

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  • The Valley of the Gods

    Cedar Mesa, Above the Valley of the Gods

    I moved 5 hours from the nearest city, 11 miles from the nearest town (Dolores, pop. 1,500), and one mile from the nearest paved road. Until recently, my nearest neighbor was a ¼ mile away. But noooo, that’s not far enough.

    In order to meditate properly, I […]

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  • Winter Road

    The Final Step Up the Grand Staircase

    After camping out in the Pariah Plateau Wilderness north of the Grand Canyon, I decided to strike camp in a hurry, in anticipation of the next adventure.  I’d chance the twenty-some mile drive down House Rock Valley Road before the rain got too bad.  I’d planned to […]

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  • Steens Mountain

    I’d once read that Steens Mountain might be the most beautiful place in all of Oregon.  That’s much said.  I’d been to Oregon’s beaches, up and down its coast, licked the icing from its Cascades, swatted mosquitoes in the heavy snows at Crater Lake in June.  So Steens had a lot to live up to.  […]

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  • Rainbow Rim, Sunset

    It Lives Up to Its Name

    The canyon losing definition as the sun breaks toward the Uinkarets, a tented line of volcanos to the west.  Declivities dissolve into dusky and soft shapes.  Cavities fill, first with light, and then swell with darkness.  Bereft of the contours chiseled from the day’s youth, the sandstone at […]

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